Lessons Learned
The 1968 Democratic convention, the Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations; the race riots all across the country and students killed at Kent State all swirled around in David’s head like over cooked vegetables in a boiling pot. He had great ambitions to make a difference and a great deal of scorn for those who didn’t. His passionate tutelage taught me early on that the Viet Nam War was wrong. He wrenched me away from my belief in the unquestioned goodness of this county and, eventually, years later, my belief in God.
Timothy Goodshot, a Lakota Sioux, was in my second grade class the first time I lived in Alliance. At the end of the school year he came up to me crying because he was being held back to repeat second grade again. He was heartbroken. I moved that summer and did not hear about him again until seventh grade while working at the store. The Corner Grocery was across the street from the County Courthouse. On the top floor was the jail and inside that jail was Timothy, who had been arrested for being drunk. Inside those barred windows I was staring at was a child my age whose life was ruined. "Drunken Indian" was a common phrase in Alliance. A common belief in this country was that, "Indians" as a race, could not hold their liquor: as if they themselves would not drink if their entire family had been killed and the survivors herded in to camps. Anger is too precise a word for how I felt about Timothy, already destroyed by the second grade. Grief is how I felt. The sound of the word comes from the back of the throat like a sob. Civil Rights was the issue Dave and I met on equal terms. The difference was that he took action. While I was working at the factory and living out my artist's fantasy, he and his wife, Linda, had taken teaching jobs a Chicago inner city elementary school.
Before beginning his second year he began trying to convince to become a substitute teacher in the same school. Apparently, since the conditions were so stressful, almost all the teachers took every sick day available to them. So desperate was the school for substitutes I could be hired full time even without a teaching certificate. I said yes, a decision the upset my brother for breaking up our little family. I was surprised at him because he did have friends and was fully involved in the small Church of Christ that we all attended. Even so, I had to leave angrily.
Dave and Linda were renting part of a duplex in Oak Park, a village next to Chicago where Frank Lloyd Wright had lived. I moved in with them. It apartment was small so I wound up staying in the basement with an oil tank for a headboard. Coming to Chicago was thrilling because it was a big city and I had a deep yearning to see a big city. Just riding the 'L' train was an adventure. The prospect of going deep into an inner city school seemed ominous, like the beginning of "The Heart of Darkness". Dave and Linda tried to prepare me. The main goal for a substitute teacher was to gain control as quickly as possible. I should enter the class room with authority, slam the door shut hard and shout "Shut up and sit down" as mean as possible they told me.
Reading the "Autobiography of Malcolm X" did not prepare me for what I was about to see. The school building was a large, old fashioned brick building similar to the elementary schools in Alliance except that all the glass windows on the first floor were gone, replaced by metal sheets. The front doors were steel with holes where a large chain was fed through. The doors were padlocked shut at eight am. Latecomers had to bang on the door until a guard opened up. I went to the office where I was given a room and walked anxiously through the loud, chaotic hallway to my assigned class for the day. I slammed the door shut and shouted so hard my glasses became briefly dislodged. Once I could focus a saw a young boy sitting on a window sill casually tossing books out the open window while the rest of the class was running around the desks like they were an obstacle course. I ran with them trying to corral each one individually and berate them into their seats. When the recess bell rang they left and, fortunately, less than half came back. I felt useless and, unless I quickly learned how to control a class, hopeless. I asked the other teachers for any help they could give me but all they offered was spiritual advice for maintaining a proper attitude. I discovered the real methods the teachers used by asking the children in each class how their teacher disciplined them. The took me to the teachers closet or desk drawer where I would find such items as a yard stick wrapped around and around with tape to make a strong spanking stick, ping pong paddles, belts, clubs made out of tightly rolled magazines, a baseball bat and spark plug wires.
Knowing the instruments were in the classroom was not much help because the thought of using them was so obviously wrong. So obviously wrong that no teacher would admit to hitting a child, in fact, I was admonished to never do it. All the veneers of civilization had been stripped away from me shortly when I began hitting little second grade girls on their open palms with a paddle or smacking forth grade boys on the legs which a yardstick wrapped in tape. Little palms and legs that were voluntarily presented for punishment by the primal beast I had become. Commands they accepted because they knew refusal would bring in the wrath of the Vice Principle. I had joined the ancient order of brutality that had kept those students in submission for the last four hundred years. The tension level was so high in those classes that at the end of the day I had to take long slow breaths to keep from throwing up. There was not enough intelligence, strength or charm to provide hope in that helpless situation let alone keep a head above the nihilistic cynicism smothering everyone in that school. We were killing off the doctors, lawyers, writers, and scientists that could have existed inside their tiny bodies.
Years later, when I was doing my stream of consciousness drawings, violent images would pop up. I was not making social commentary. The drawings are about crimes committed by me.
Timothy Goodshot, a Lakota Sioux, was in my second grade class the first time I lived in Alliance. At the end of the school year he came up to me crying because he was being held back to repeat second grade again. He was heartbroken. I moved that summer and did not hear about him again until seventh grade while working at the store. The Corner Grocery was across the street from the County Courthouse. On the top floor was the jail and inside that jail was Timothy, who had been arrested for being drunk. Inside those barred windows I was staring at was a child my age whose life was ruined. "Drunken Indian" was a common phrase in Alliance. A common belief in this country was that, "Indians" as a race, could not hold their liquor: as if they themselves would not drink if their entire family had been killed and the survivors herded in to camps. Anger is too precise a word for how I felt about Timothy, already destroyed by the second grade. Grief is how I felt. The sound of the word comes from the back of the throat like a sob. Civil Rights was the issue Dave and I met on equal terms. The difference was that he took action. While I was working at the factory and living out my artist's fantasy, he and his wife, Linda, had taken teaching jobs a Chicago inner city elementary school.
Before beginning his second year he began trying to convince to become a substitute teacher in the same school. Apparently, since the conditions were so stressful, almost all the teachers took every sick day available to them. So desperate was the school for substitutes I could be hired full time even without a teaching certificate. I said yes, a decision the upset my brother for breaking up our little family. I was surprised at him because he did have friends and was fully involved in the small Church of Christ that we all attended. Even so, I had to leave angrily.
Dave and Linda were renting part of a duplex in Oak Park, a village next to Chicago where Frank Lloyd Wright had lived. I moved in with them. It apartment was small so I wound up staying in the basement with an oil tank for a headboard. Coming to Chicago was thrilling because it was a big city and I had a deep yearning to see a big city. Just riding the 'L' train was an adventure. The prospect of going deep into an inner city school seemed ominous, like the beginning of "The Heart of Darkness". Dave and Linda tried to prepare me. The main goal for a substitute teacher was to gain control as quickly as possible. I should enter the class room with authority, slam the door shut hard and shout "Shut up and sit down" as mean as possible they told me.
Reading the "Autobiography of Malcolm X" did not prepare me for what I was about to see. The school building was a large, old fashioned brick building similar to the elementary schools in Alliance except that all the glass windows on the first floor were gone, replaced by metal sheets. The front doors were steel with holes where a large chain was fed through. The doors were padlocked shut at eight am. Latecomers had to bang on the door until a guard opened up. I went to the office where I was given a room and walked anxiously through the loud, chaotic hallway to my assigned class for the day. I slammed the door shut and shouted so hard my glasses became briefly dislodged. Once I could focus a saw a young boy sitting on a window sill casually tossing books out the open window while the rest of the class was running around the desks like they were an obstacle course. I ran with them trying to corral each one individually and berate them into their seats. When the recess bell rang they left and, fortunately, less than half came back. I felt useless and, unless I quickly learned how to control a class, hopeless. I asked the other teachers for any help they could give me but all they offered was spiritual advice for maintaining a proper attitude. I discovered the real methods the teachers used by asking the children in each class how their teacher disciplined them. The took me to the teachers closet or desk drawer where I would find such items as a yard stick wrapped around and around with tape to make a strong spanking stick, ping pong paddles, belts, clubs made out of tightly rolled magazines, a baseball bat and spark plug wires.
Knowing the instruments were in the classroom was not much help because the thought of using them was so obviously wrong. So obviously wrong that no teacher would admit to hitting a child, in fact, I was admonished to never do it. All the veneers of civilization had been stripped away from me shortly when I began hitting little second grade girls on their open palms with a paddle or smacking forth grade boys on the legs which a yardstick wrapped in tape. Little palms and legs that were voluntarily presented for punishment by the primal beast I had become. Commands they accepted because they knew refusal would bring in the wrath of the Vice Principle. I had joined the ancient order of brutality that had kept those students in submission for the last four hundred years. The tension level was so high in those classes that at the end of the day I had to take long slow breaths to keep from throwing up. There was not enough intelligence, strength or charm to provide hope in that helpless situation let alone keep a head above the nihilistic cynicism smothering everyone in that school. We were killing off the doctors, lawyers, writers, and scientists that could have existed inside their tiny bodies.
Years later, when I was doing my stream of consciousness drawings, violent images would pop up. I was not making social commentary. The drawings are about crimes committed by me.
Substitute teachers have a notoriously hard time managing a class, especially when the classes were overcrowded and filled with hungry students who were desperate for any kind relief from the tyranny of an education they had not been adequately prepared for. They needed talk, laugh, run around, beat out rhythms on walls, exact revenge for insults or scream in anguish from the punishment of bullies. The level of noise was always rising to a never ending crescendo of torturous volume requiring every technique I could think to resist the siren song of the chattering children driving me towards the madness of corporal punishment.
I devised a plan to control the class based on the need for the children to use the bathroom. No child in each row could use the bathroom unless the whole row had been quiet. I numbered each row on the black board and used X's to note infractions. The technique did not work well at the beginning of the day but gradually the room got quieter and quieter. The most effective use of the plan was rewarding the row with fewest X's the chance to leave class a couple minutes early for the lunch line. The brief joy of those children at that moment was my only accomplishment and even that was at the expense of the others hoping for any extra morsal of happiness.
The technique was useless for older classes. They would have paid no attention and just gone to the bathroom. Those children were generally calmer anyway, due to maturity of their age. At that age, unmanageable behavior was handled by the Vice Principle or the law itself, if needed. Eight graders were an imposing bunch, veterans of a life I would have been lucky to survive. One day, two eight grade girls jumped up and started pounding each other and I stepped in-between to break them up. My head was snapped back so hard by a fist that my snap on tie flew off, along with my glasses and all the pencils in my pocket. The class gently picked me up and helped reassemble my wardrobe.
The trauma of that overcrowded school did not come from the children being rebellious, it from their desire to have fun, tell jokes, express their creative whims and move around when their bodies needed motion. One fourth grade boy did an amazing drum solo as he walked around the room rattling his drum stick off walls, desks, flagpoles and windows. I had to let him have a minute or two in his revery before stepping in to berate him into submission. He was in the school band taught by a drug infused new age teacher who walked through the turmoil with immunity because if his students misbehaved he simply took their instruments away. The only thing I had to take away was the promise of their future which did not exist for most of them anyway.
The time after school I spent painting and drawing and doing yoga. I got so limber I could lay my head flat on my knees. I made a couple paintings I really loved but never photographed and eventually lost. Dave and I worked together on a novel. He did the writing and did a sort of abstract, slash, realistic pictorial illustrations. We dove headlong into the delusion of grandeur with such abandon that the results were too awful to ever be seen or mentioned again, with rejection slips as the tombstone.
I devised a plan to control the class based on the need for the children to use the bathroom. No child in each row could use the bathroom unless the whole row had been quiet. I numbered each row on the black board and used X's to note infractions. The technique did not work well at the beginning of the day but gradually the room got quieter and quieter. The most effective use of the plan was rewarding the row with fewest X's the chance to leave class a couple minutes early for the lunch line. The brief joy of those children at that moment was my only accomplishment and even that was at the expense of the others hoping for any extra morsal of happiness.
The technique was useless for older classes. They would have paid no attention and just gone to the bathroom. Those children were generally calmer anyway, due to maturity of their age. At that age, unmanageable behavior was handled by the Vice Principle or the law itself, if needed. Eight graders were an imposing bunch, veterans of a life I would have been lucky to survive. One day, two eight grade girls jumped up and started pounding each other and I stepped in-between to break them up. My head was snapped back so hard by a fist that my snap on tie flew off, along with my glasses and all the pencils in my pocket. The class gently picked me up and helped reassemble my wardrobe.
The trauma of that overcrowded school did not come from the children being rebellious, it from their desire to have fun, tell jokes, express their creative whims and move around when their bodies needed motion. One fourth grade boy did an amazing drum solo as he walked around the room rattling his drum stick off walls, desks, flagpoles and windows. I had to let him have a minute or two in his revery before stepping in to berate him into submission. He was in the school band taught by a drug infused new age teacher who walked through the turmoil with immunity because if his students misbehaved he simply took their instruments away. The only thing I had to take away was the promise of their future which did not exist for most of them anyway.
The time after school I spent painting and drawing and doing yoga. I got so limber I could lay my head flat on my knees. I made a couple paintings I really loved but never photographed and eventually lost. Dave and I worked together on a novel. He did the writing and did a sort of abstract, slash, realistic pictorial illustrations. We dove headlong into the delusion of grandeur with such abandon that the results were too awful to ever be seen or mentioned again, with rejection slips as the tombstone.
The third grade class started out like most of classes I was assigned to for the day, starting with a quick search through the desk looking for any kind of lesson plan that could give me a clue how to proceed with the day. Once the class had settled I wrote my name on the board. Considering the damage I had been causing to innocent children, I cynically spelled out the name “Attila De Hunn” one day.
Unknown to me, the afternoon before, the actual teacher had marched out into the parking lot and proceeding screaming for half an hour before getting into her car and driving away. She phoned in her resignation from home. Suddenly those children had a new teacher named Mr. Hunn.
I had never taken a single class on teaching and had no experience other than screaming and hitting and was inadequate for what they needed. When the Principal asked me just to take over the class I panicked and agreed only if they were seriously going to look for a replacement. I was in the class for six weeks.
The desk presented me with a sense of power I had not appreciated as a vagabond substitute teacher. Like a captain on a deck I could keep a barrier between myself and the stormy sea of children spread out in front of me. I had graduated from a substitute to an imitation teacher. I learned the third grade lessons plans as quickly and the lessons learned from the brutality of substitute teaching help me control the class enough to get to know the children. In the beginning I had to rely on the Vice Principle and his belt, which he used liberally in the privacy of his office to calm down the most unruly. I asked for him I was not intelligent enough to negotiate with the young warriors battling or any kind of spoils they could win. I had live day to day without illusion of understanding the world I was in.
One day, after several weeks had passed and daily routine had allowed for moments of calm, I was sitting behind my desk grading the paper of a young girl who was standing beside me when I felt her fingers gently stroke my hair. She she pulled her hand away when I looked at her and smiled briefly before looking down. Filled with the same curiosity, I reached out and gently stoked her low afro. In unison, all the girls in the class jumped out of their seat and charged toward me, climbing right over the desk with their arms outstretched towards my head like a wave breaching an embankment. In a flash I was on the ground with dozens of fingers rubbing my hair. I starting rubbing as many of their heads as I could reach in return, stirring up fever in them that made me fear being torn bald. Yelling for them to stop and waving away their arms I managed to stand up. Fortunately; perhaps stunned at what had just had just done; they filed politely back to their seats. A few girls hung back because they missed their chance to reach me. I bent down and offered my head to them. They politely stroked my hair and then joined the rest of the class in their seats.Three weeks later I was notified that a new teacher had been found. I was sad to leave by then but they deserved a teacher that was properly trained. On my last day the girls handed me a card they had made.
Unknown to me, the afternoon before, the actual teacher had marched out into the parking lot and proceeding screaming for half an hour before getting into her car and driving away. She phoned in her resignation from home. Suddenly those children had a new teacher named Mr. Hunn.
I had never taken a single class on teaching and had no experience other than screaming and hitting and was inadequate for what they needed. When the Principal asked me just to take over the class I panicked and agreed only if they were seriously going to look for a replacement. I was in the class for six weeks.
The desk presented me with a sense of power I had not appreciated as a vagabond substitute teacher. Like a captain on a deck I could keep a barrier between myself and the stormy sea of children spread out in front of me. I had graduated from a substitute to an imitation teacher. I learned the third grade lessons plans as quickly and the lessons learned from the brutality of substitute teaching help me control the class enough to get to know the children. In the beginning I had to rely on the Vice Principle and his belt, which he used liberally in the privacy of his office to calm down the most unruly. I asked for him I was not intelligent enough to negotiate with the young warriors battling or any kind of spoils they could win. I had live day to day without illusion of understanding the world I was in.
One day, after several weeks had passed and daily routine had allowed for moments of calm, I was sitting behind my desk grading the paper of a young girl who was standing beside me when I felt her fingers gently stroke my hair. She she pulled her hand away when I looked at her and smiled briefly before looking down. Filled with the same curiosity, I reached out and gently stoked her low afro. In unison, all the girls in the class jumped out of their seat and charged toward me, climbing right over the desk with their arms outstretched towards my head like a wave breaching an embankment. In a flash I was on the ground with dozens of fingers rubbing my hair. I starting rubbing as many of their heads as I could reach in return, stirring up fever in them that made me fear being torn bald. Yelling for them to stop and waving away their arms I managed to stand up. Fortunately; perhaps stunned at what had just had just done; they filed politely back to their seats. A few girls hung back because they missed their chance to reach me. I bent down and offered my head to them. They politely stroked my hair and then joined the rest of the class in their seats.Three weeks later I was notified that a new teacher had been found. I was sad to leave by then but they deserved a teacher that was properly trained. On my last day the girls handed me a card they had made.
